This complete Introduction to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion by one of the pioneering scientists in this expanding field offers both a simple and intuitive discussion of the basic concepts of this subject and an insight into the challenging problems of current research.
In basic experiments, he and his students were among the first to study Brillouin and Ram.
He built the first laser at UCLA.
Chen then left magnetic Fusion to help start the field of laser fusion.
Soon after, however, powerful lasers were invented, opening up a whole new field of research.
He wrote the first undergraduate textbook in this field in 1973.
In 1969, Chen went from Princeton to UCLA in California, where he organized an academic program in Plasma physics.
Modern magnetic bottles (called tokamaks), using advanced methods of stabilization, can hold a hot Plasma for minutes.
In L-2, Chen and Mosher showed how this turbulence could be suppressed by magnetic fields that were not totally straight but had what is called shear.
They are now known as resistive drift waves and were discovered simultaneously in Russia by Sagdeev and Pogutse.
While on sabbatical in Paris, Chen figured out what these new waves were.
Experiments on these showed that the Plasma was lost by turbulence, and these random motions were aligned along the magnetic field, with wavelengths longer than any Plasma waves known at that time.
Chen then built the L-1 and L-2 machines with straight magnetic fields.
Realizing that stellarators were magnetic bottles that were curved and not straight, he convinced Spitzer to allow him to build straight machines to isolate the problem, even though these would have leaks at the ends.
Subsequent Model B stellarators, however, failed to do this for longer than milliseconds.
By then, it was clear that Fusion would require trapping a plasma, a hot, ionized gas of electrons and ions, and not just electrons.
With the B1, Chen was the first to show that electrons could be trapped by a magnetic field for millions of traverses.
Chen inherited the Model B1 Stellarator, built by James van Allen of the famous van Allen radiation belts around the earth.
Project Matterhorn started in two old buildings, one formerly a rabbit hutch, and the other a horse operating room.
In 1954, Chen was one of the first 15 employees at what is now the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). to tame the hydrogen bomb to make energy peacefully from the same reaction.
This was one of four initial projects in the U.
S.
To avoid the Korean War draft, he then went to work for the astronomer Lyman Spitzer, Jr., who had just started the classified Project Matterhorn at Princeton University.
He had been sent by his adviser, Nobelist Norman Ramsey, to Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he worked on the Cosmotron and wrote the first experimental thesis for energies at or above 1 GeV. from Harvard in 1954.
With pulsars and quasars still undiscovered, he switched to High Energy Physics, receiving his Ph.
D.
Bok, Donald Menzel, and Earl Whipple.
His all-star oral committee consisted of famous astronomers Harlow Shapley, Bart J. from Harvard Observatory in 1950.
Chen, known as Frank in the Physics community, got his B.
A.
About the Author Francis F.
For the third edition, updates was made throughout each existing chapter, and two new chapters were added
Ch 9 on "Special Plasmas" and Ch 10 on Plasma Applications (including Atmospheric Plasmas).
This revised edition contains new material on kinetic effects, including Bernstein waves and the Plasma dispersion function, and on nonlinear wave equations and solitons.
For students, this outstanding text offers a painless Introduction to this important field; for teachers, a large collection of problems; and for researchers, a concise review of the fundamentals as well as original treatments of a number of topics never before explained so clearly.
In a wholly lucid manner the work covers single-particle motions, fluid equations for plasmas, wave motions, difFusion and resistivity, Landau damping, Plasma instabilities and nonlinear problems.
This complete Introduction to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion by one of the pioneering scientists in this expanding field offers both a simple and intuitive discussion of the basic concepts of this subject and an insight into the challenging problems of current research
